Sunday, September 10, 2017

Were the Atrocious Decisions of George Bush, Barack Obama & the Clintons ...

I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011. All of 18, he was short, scrawny, and popular. Nine months after graduating from high school, he’d found himself chasing the Taliban with the rest of our gang. At five foot nothing, I once saw him step into an irrigation canal and disappear from sight -- all but the two-foot antenna on his radio. In my daydreams, I always see the same scene, the moment his filthy, grizzled baby face reappeared above that ditch, a cigarette still dangling loosely from his lips. His name was Anderson and I can remember thinking at that moment: What will I tell his mother if he gets killed out here?

And then... poof... it’s 2017 again and I’m here in Kansas, pushing papers at Fort Leavenworth, those days in the field long gone. Anderson himself survived his tour of duty in Afghanistan, though I’ve no idea where he is today. A better commander might. Several of his buddies were less fortunate. They died, or found themselves short a limb or two, or emotionally and morally scarred for life.

From time to time I can’t help thinking of Anderson, and others like him, alive and dead. In fact, I wear two bracelets on my wrist engraved with the names of the young men who died under my command in Afghanistan and Iraq, six names in all. When I find a moment, I need to add another. It wasn’t too long ago that one of my soldiers took his own life. Sometimes the war doesn’t kill you until years later.

And of this much I’m certain: the moment our nation puts any PFC Anderson in harm’s way, thousands of miles and light years from Kansas, there had better be a damn good reason for it, a vital, tangible national interest at stake. At the very least, this country better be on the right side in the conflicts we’re fighting.

The Wrong Side

It’s long been an article of faith here: the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the planet’s “indispensable nation.” But what if we’re wrong? After all, as far as I can tell, the view from the Arab or African “street” tells a different story altogether. Americans tend to loathe the judgments of foreigners, but sober strategy demands that once in a while we walk the proverbial mile in the global shoes of others. After all, almost 16 years into the war on terror it should be apparent that something isn’t working. Perhaps it’s time to ask whether the United States is really playing the role of the positive protagonist in a great global drama.

I know what you’re thinking: ISIS, the Islamic State, is a truly awful outfit. And so it is and the U.S. is indeed combatting it, though various allies and even adversaries (think: Iran) are doing most of the fighting. Still, with the broader war for the Greater Middle East in mind, wouldn’t it be appropriate to stop for a moment and ask: Just whose side is America really on?

Certainly, it’s not the side of the average Arab. That should be apparent. Take a good, hard look at the region and it’s obvious that Washington mainly supports the interests of Israel, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt’s military dictator, and various Gulf State autocracies. Or consider the actions and statements of the Trump administration and of the two administrations that preceded it and here’s what seems obvious: the United States is in many ways little more than an air force, military trainer, and weapons depot for assorted Sunni despots. Now, that’s not a point made too often -- not in this context anyway -- because it’s neither a comfortable thought for most Americans, nor a particularly convenient reality for establishment policymakers to broadcast, but it’s the truth.

Yes, we do fight ISIS, but it’s hardly that simple. Saudi Arabia, our main regional ally, may portray itself as the leader of a “moderate Sunni block” when it comes to both Iran and terrorism, but the reality is, at best, far grayer than that. The Saudis -- with whom President Trump announced a $110 billion arms deal during the first stop on his inaugural foreign trip back in May -- have spent the last few decades spreading their intolerant brand of Islam across the region. In the process, they’ve also supported al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.

Maybe you’re willing to argue that al-Qaeda spin-offs aren’t ISIS, but don’t forget who brought down those towers in New York. While President Trump enjoyed a traditional sword dance with his Saudi hosts -- no doubt gratifying his martial tastes -- the air forces of the Saudis and their Gulf state allies were bombing and missiling Yemeni civilians into the grimmest of situations, including a massive famine and a spreading cholera epidemic amid the ruins of their impoverished country. So much for the disastrous two-year Saudi war there, which goes by the grimly ironic moniker of Operation Restoring Hope and for which the U.S. military provides midair refueling and advanced munitions, as well as intelligence.

If you’re a human rights enthusiast, it’s also worth asking just what kind of states we’re working with here. In Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive automobiles, “sorcery” is a capital offense, and people are beheaded in public. Hooray for American values! And newsflash: Iran’s leaders -- whom the Trump administration and its generals are obsessed with demonizing -- may be no angels, but the Islamic republic they preside over is a far more democratic country than Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy. Imagine Louis XIV in a kufiyah and you’ve just about nailed the nature of Saudi rule.

After Israel, Egypt is the number two recipient of direct U.S. military aid, to the tune of $1.3 billion annually. And that bedrock of liberal values is led by U.S.-trained General Abdul el-Sisi, a strongman who seized power in a coup and then, just for good measure, had his army gun down a crowd demonstrating in favor of the deposed democratically elected president. And how did the American beacon of hope respond? Well, Sisi’s still in power; the Egyptian military is once again receiving aid from the Pentagon; and, in April, President Trump paraded the general around the White House, assuring reporters, “in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President el-Sisi... he’s done a fantastic job!”

In Syria and Iraq, the U.S. military is fighting a loathsome adversary in ISIS, but even so, the situation is far more complicated than usually imagined here. As a start, the U.S. air offensive to support allied Syrian and Kurdish rebels fighting to take ISIS’s “capital,” Raqqa -- grimly titled Operation Wrath of the Euphrates -- killed more civilians this past May and June than the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. In addition, America’s brutal air campaign appears unhinged from any coherent long-term strategy. No one in charge seems to have the faintest clue what exactly will follow ISIS’s rule in eastern Syria. A Kurdish mini-state? A three-way civil war between Kurds, Sunni tribes, and Assad’s forces (with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic Turkey as the wild card in the situation)? Which begs the question: Are American bombs actually helping?

Similarly, in Iraq it’s not clear that the future rule of Shia-dominated militia groups and others in the rubble left by the last years of grim battle in areas ISIS previously controlled will actually prove measurably superior to the nightmare that preceded them. The present Shia-dominated government might even slip back into the sectarianchauvinism that helped empower ISIS in the first place. That way, the U.S. can fight its fourth war in Iraq since 1991!

And keep in mind that the war for the Greater Middle East -- and I fought in it myself both in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is just the latest venture in the depressing annals of Washington’s geo-strategic thinking since President Ronald Reagan’s administration, along with the Saudis and Pakistanis, armed, funded, and supported extreme fundamentalist Afghan mujahedeen rebels in a Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union that eventually led to the 9/11 attacks. His administration also threw money, guns, and training -- sometimes illegally -- at the brutal Nicaraguan Contras in another Cold War covert conflict in which about 100,000 civilians died.

In those years, the United States also stood by apartheid South Africa -- long after the rest of the world shunned that racist state -- not even removing Nelson Mandela’s name from its terrorist watch list until 2008! And don’t forget Washington’s support for Jonas Savimbi’s National Movement for the Total Independence of Angola that would contribute to the death of some 500,000 Angolans. And that’s just to begin a list that would roll on and on.

That, of course, is the relatively distant past, but the history of U.S. military action in the twenty-first century suggests that Washington seems destined to repeat the process of choosing the wrong, or one of the wrong, sides into the foreseeable future. Today’s Middle East is but a single exhibit in a prolonged tour of hypocrisy.

Boundless Hypocrisy

Maybe it’s because most Americans just aren’t paying attention or maybe we’re a nation of true believers, but it’s clear that most of us still cling to the idea that our country is a beacon of hope for the planet. Never known for our collective self-awareness, we’re eternally aghast to discover that so many elsewhere find little but insincerity in the promise of U.S. foreign policy. “Why do they hate us,” Americans have asked, with evident disbelief, for much of this century. Here are just a few hints related to the Greater Middle East:

*Post-9/11, the United States unleashed chaos in the region, destabilized it in stunning ways, and via an invasion launched on false premises created the conditions for ISIS’s rise. (That terror group quite literally formed in an American prison in post-invasion Iraq.) Later, with failing or failedstates dotting the region, the U.S. response to the worst refugee crisis since World War II has been to admit -- to choose but a single devastated country -- a paltry 18,000 Syrians since 2011. Canada took in three times that number last year; Sweden more than 50,000 in 2015 alone; and Turkey hosts three million displaced Syrians.

*Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s attempts to put in place a Muslim travel ban haven’t won this country any friends in the region either; nor will the president’s -- or White House aideStephen Miller's -- proposed “reform” of U.S. immigration policy, which would prioritize English-speakers, cut in half legal migration within a decade, and limit the ability of citizens and legal residents to sponsor relatives. How do you think that’s going to play in the global war for hearts and minds? As much as Miller would love to change Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty to “give me your well educated, your highly skilled, your English-speaking masses yearning to be free,” count on one thing: world opinion won’t miss the duplicity and hypocrisy of such an approach.

*Guantánamo -- perhaps the single best Islamist recruiting tool on Earth -- is still open. And, says President Trump, we’re “keeping it open... and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” On this, he’s likely to be a man of his word. A new executive order is expected soon, preparing the way for an expansion of that prison’s population, while the Pentagon is already planning to put almost half a billion dollars into the construction of new facilities there in the coming years. No matter how upset the world gets at any of this, no matter how ISIS and other terror groups use it for their brand of advertising, no American officials will be held to account, because the United States is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Hypocritical? Nope, just utterly all-American.

*And speaking of prisons, thanks to nearly unqualified -- sometimes almost irrational -- U.S. support for Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank increasingly resemble walled off penal complexes. You almost have to admire President Trump for not even pretending to play the honest broker in the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He typically told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “One state, two state... I like whichever you like.” The safe money says Netanyahu will choose neither, opting instead to keep the Palestinians in political limbo without civil rights or a sovereign state, while Israel embarks on a settlement bonanza in the occupied territories. And speaking of American exceptionalism, we’re almost alone on the world stage when it comes to our support for the Israeli occupation.

The Cost

Given the nature of contemporary American war-fighting (far away and generally lightly covered by the media, which has an endless stream of Trump tweets to fawn over), it’s easy to forget that American troops are still dying in modest numbers in the Greater Middle East, in Syria, Iraq,Somalia,and -- almost 16 years after the American invasion of that country -- Afghanistan.

As for myself, from time to time (too often for comfort) I can’t help thinking of PFC Anderson and those I led who were so much less fortunate than him: Rios, Hensley, Clark, Hockenberry (a triple amputee), Fuller, Balsley, and Smith. Sometimes, when I can bear it, I even think about the war’s countless Afghan victims. And then I wish I could truly believe that we were indisputably the “good guys” in our unending wars across the Greater Middle East because that’s what we owed those soldiers.

And it pains me no less that Americans tend to blindly venerate the PFC Andersons of our world, to put them on such a pedestal (as the president did in his Afghan address to the nation recently), offering them eternal thanks, and so making them and their heroism the reason for fighting on, while most of the rest of us don’t waste a moment thinking about what (and whom) they’re truly fighting for.

If ever you have the urge to do just that, ask yourself the following question: Would I be able to confidently explain to someone’s mother what (besides his mates) her child actually died for?

What would you tell her? That he (or she)died to ensure Saudi hegemony in the Persian Gulf, or to facilitate the rise of ISIS, or an eternal Guantanamo, or the spread of terror groups, or the creation of yet more refugees for us to fear, or the further bombing of Yemen to ensure a famine of epic proportions?

Maybe you could do that, but I couldn’t and can’t. Not anymore, anyway. There have already been too many mothers, too many widows, for whom those explanations couldn’t be lamer. And so many dead -- American, Afghan, Iraqi, and all the rest -- that eventually I find myself sitting on a bar stool staring at the six names on those bracelets of mine, the wreckage of two wars reflecting back at me, knowing I’ll never be able to articulate a coherent explanation for their loved ones, should I ever have the courage to try.

Fear, guilt, embarrassment... my crosses to bear, as the war Anderson and I fought only expands further and undoubtedly more disastrously. My choices, my shame. No excuses.

Here’s the truth of it, if you just stop to think about America’s wars for a moment: it’s only going to get harder to look a widow or mother in the eye and justify them in the years to come. Maybe a good soldier doesn’t bother to worry about that... but I now know one thing at least: I’m not that.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

The Jewish State walks the walk and sends strong signal to its genocidal enemies.September 8, 2017 Ari Libermn

In the early morning hours of Thursday, Syria’s al-Tala’i military research facility located in Masyaf was reduced to ash and flames. The Jerusalem Post reports that contemporaneous with the strike on al-Tala’I, a Hezbollah weapons convoy in the vicinity was also hit and destroyed. According to Western intelligence sources, al-Tala’i is a center for the production of chemical weapons. Syria blamed Israel and claimed that at least two regime soldiers were killed in the attack. The regime issued a banal and somewhat hypocritical warning of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region.”

Israeli officials were mute but Israel’s defense minister Avigdor Liberman issued a terse statement shortly after the attack making it clear that Israel reserves the right to act when its interests are affected. “We are not looking for any military adventure in Syria but we are determined to prevent our enemies from harming, or even creating the opportunity to harm the security of Israeli citizens,” he said. This is as close to an admission that we’re likely to witness.

According to former Israel Air Force Head Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel, Israel has carried out over 100 precision strikes in Syria in the past five years, mostly aimed at thwarting arms transfers to Hezbollah. Other strikes, like the one carried out on January 18, 2015, have been aimed at sending a message to Iran and Hezbollah that Israel will not tolerate the creation of Iranian or Hezbollah bases near the Golan Heights border. Twelve Iranian and Hezbollah operatives, including the son of Imad Mughniyeh, and an Iranian general, were killed in that raid.

The al-Tala’i facility is located in northwest Syria near the Russian naval base at Tartus and lies 70km southeast of Russia’s largest and most important airbase in the Mideast, Khmeimim air force base. Russia maintains formidable air defenses in Syria, including the S-400 anti-aircraft platform but the Russians refrained from firing. Perhaps the Israeli aircraft simply didn’t register on the S-400’s radar system – Israel is known to possess a sophisticated array of electronic counter measures – or perhaps there is an unspoken understanding between the Israeli and Russian militaries – the two nations maintain effective liaisons to prevent military mishaps. No one can say for certain why the Russians held their fire but either way, it was a clean operation with no Israeli casualties, no collateral damage and no political fallout.

There is speculation that Syria was prepared to hand over the facility to its ally, Hezbollah. This theory was forwarded by former Israeli national security adviser, Maj.-Gen (ret.) Yaakov Amidror. Amidror, who is currently an analyst at Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, cited a recent visit to Damascus by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah where the terror leader requested control of the facility. The acquisition of a WMD facility in the hands of the world’s most dangerous and best armed terrorist organization would represent a strategic threat to Israel, and one that the Jewish State could not easily ignore. Amridor’s theory seems plausible and if accurate, would explain the urgency of the Israeli action.

It is somewhat ironic that the attack on al-Tala’i comes on heels of the 10th anniversary of Israel’s precision raid against Syria’s atomic bomb facility, known as al-Kibar, in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria’s eastern desert expanse. Modeled after Pyongyang’s plutonium atom bomb plant, Syria’s al-Kibar facility posed an existential threat to Israel. Israel presented its dispositive intelligence findings to the Bush administration, which was reluctant to act. Israel then decided to act unilaterally and on September 6, 2007, terminated the threat with a textbook operation executed by F-15I Ra'am and F-16I Sufa fighter-bombers. Israel tied loose ends the following year by liquidating the mastermind of Syria’s WMD program, General Muhammad Suleiman by dispatching him with well-placed sniper shots at his seaside resort villa near Tartus. The liquidation of Suleiman closed the chapter on Syria’s nuclear ambitions.

But Syria still maintained a large stockpile of chemical weapons and under Bashar Assad’s reign, indiscriminately used those weapons against civilian and rebel forces alike. In 2014, Putin and Assad outmaneuvered a pusillanimous Barack Obama and bamboozled him and his dimwitted secretary of state, John Kerry, into believing that Syria had destroyed its chemical weapons arsenal. Subsequent chemical weapon attacks by Assad, including an April 4, 2017 Sarin gas attack that resulted in the murder of 80 civilians, proved that Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal was still very much intact, despite the Obama administration’s self-congratulatory statements to the contrary.

By its actions on Thursday, Israel has once again demonstrated to the world, and sent a strong message to its enemies, chiefly Iran and Hezbollah, that it will act resolutely whenever its interests are threatened by its genocidal neighbors. It remains to be seen whether Israel’s enemies will retaliate but judging by past responses and cognizant of their own limitations, they’ll likely limit their reaction to hyperbolic rhetoric against the “Zionist entity.”

Once again Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson ignores what Israeli's write ...

... strengthen the diplomatic working assumption that Assad will continue to be Syrian president, especially since opponents of his regime in Europe, the United States and Turkey – and even Saudi Arabia – have nearly completely withdrawn their demands to remove him as a precondition to any negotiations.

Such a result would obligate Israel to be a partner, even if only indirectly, in the process of establishing a new Syrian government; in the debate over the status of Iran and Hezbollah in Syria; and the guarantees that Russia, and not the United States, can provide in response to the possible threats resulting from such an agreement.....Israel may very well conclude that the greater its military involvement in Syria, whether through sporadic attacks or by tightening its military ties to rebel groups, it more it will strengthen its position when the time comes to formulate a political settlement.

But such a view can be a double-edged sword. It will grant Iran a wonderful excuse to increase its military presence in Syria; Russia may reduce or even eliminate its aerial coordination with Israel and declare Syrian airspace a no-fly zone; and Hezbollah could turn the Golan Heights into a legitimate front against Israel as part of its balance of deterrence with it.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.811226

Typical of Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson, and a verification of the article which is the basis of this thread he totally ignores reality ...

Probably because he is just so ignorant of the 'Real World'Bob Mon Jun 05, 02:37:00 PM EDT

Google has taken the unprecedented step of burying material, mostly from websites on the political right, that it has deemed to be inappropriate. The problem, however, is that the world's largest search engine is a left-leaning company with an ax to grind.Let's face it, deep down in our heart of hearts we knew the honeymoon wouldn't last forever. Our willingness to place eternal faith in an earth-straddling company that oversees the largest collection of information ever assembled was doomed to end in a bitter divorce from the start. After all, each corporation, just like humans, has their own political proclivities, and Google is certainly no exception. But we aren't talking about your average car company here.

The first sign Google would eventually become more of a political liability than a public utility was revealed in 2005 when CEO Eric Schmidt (who is now executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc, Google's parent company) sat down with interviewer Charlie Rose, who asked Schmidt to explain "where the future of search is going."

Schmidt's response should have triggered alarm bells across the free world.

"Well, when you use Google, do you get more than one answer," Schmidt asked rhetorically, before answering deceptively. "Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once... and we should never be wrong."

Really?

Think about that for a moment. Schmidt believes, counter-intuitively, that getting multiple possible choices for any one Google query is not the desirable prospect it should be (aren't consumers always in search of more variety?), but rather a "bug" that should be duly squashed underfoot. Silly mortal, you should not expect more than one answer for every question because the almighty Google, our modern-day Oz, "should never be wrong!" This is the epitome of corporate hubris. And it doesn't require much imagination to see that such a master plan will only lead to a colossal whitewashing of the historic record.

For example, if a Google user performs a search request for - oh, I don't know - 'what caused the Iraq War 2003,' he or she would be given, according to Schmidt's algorithmic wet dream, exactly one canned answer. Any guesses on what that answer would be? I think it's safe to say the only acceptable answer would be the state-sanctioned conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction, an oft-repeated claim we now know to be patently false. The list of other such complicated events that also demand more than one answer - from the Kennedy assassination to the Gulf of Tonkin incident - could be continued for many pages.

Schmidt's grandiose vision, where there is just "one answer to every question," sounds like a chapter borrowed from Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where omnipresent Big Brother had an ironclad grip on history, news, information, everything. In such a intensely controlled, nightmarish world, individuals - as well as entire historical events - can be 'disappeared' down the memory hole without a trace. Though we've not quite reached that bad land yet, we're plodding along in that direction.

That much became disturbingly clear ever since Donald Trump routed Hillary Clinton for the presidency. This surprise event became the bugle call for Google to wage war on 'fake news' outlets, predominantly on the political right.

Just before Americans headed to the polls in last year's presidential election, WikiLeaks delivered a well-timed steaming dump, revealing that Eric Schmidt had been working with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as early as April 2014. This news came courtesy of a leaked email from John Podesta, former chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, who wrote: "I met with Eric Schmidt tonight. As David reported, he's ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn't pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn't seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going..."

The implications of the CEO of the world's most powerful company playing favorites in a presidential race are obvious, and make the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s resemble a rigged game of bingo at the local senior citizens center by comparison. Yet the dumbed-down world of American politics, which only seems to get excited when Republicans goof up, continued to turn on its wobbly axis as if nothing untold had occurred.

Before continuing our trip down memory lane, let's fast forward a moment for a reality check. Google's romance with the US political left is not a matter of conjecture. In fact, it has just become the subject of a released internal memo penned by one James Damore, a former Google engineer. In the 10-point memo, Damore discussed at length the extreme liberal atmosphere that pervades Google, saying that being a conservative in the Silicon Valley sweat shop was like "being gay in the 1950s."

"We have... this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves. Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s. These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative."

Beyond the quirky, laid back image of a Google campus, where 'Googlers' enjoy free food and foot massages, lies a "monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves,"says Damore, who was very cynically fired from Google for daring to express a personal opinion. That is strange.

Although Google loudly trumpets its multicultural diversity in terms of its hiring policy, it clearly has a problem dealing with a diversity of opinion. That attitude does not seem to bode well for a search engine company that must remain impartial on all matters - political or otherwise.

Bob Thu May 27, 12:52:00 AM EDTBut I did rip off the bank for $7500 hundred dollars, when I was on my knees, and fighting for my economic life, on my aunt's credit card. But that wasn't really stealing, just payback.

Tragedy as 19-year-old son of former Fox News host Eric Bolling dies hours after his father was fired in wake of allegations he texted photos of male genitalia to at least three colleaguesEric Chase, 19, the son of fired Fox News host Eric Bolling, died on Friday evening, hours after his father was fired from Fox NewsEric Bolling confirmed the death on Saturday with a message posted to Twitter'Adrienne and I are devastated by the loss of our beloved son Eric Chase last night. Details still unclear. Thoughts, prayers appreciated.' Fox News released a statement on Saturday, saying: 'We are very saddened to hear of the passing of Eric Bolling's son' Condolences from media figures including Don Lemon, Joy Reid, Sean Hannity, and Geraldo Rivera were pouring in on Saturday Longtime host Bolling, 54, agreed to leave the network after network launched investigation into claims of sexual harassmentAt least two women at Fox Business Network and one woman from Fox News all accuse Bolling of sending them a photo of male genitalia via text message

During last year's razor thin races at the top of the New Hampshire ballot, 6,540 voters registered to vote using a driver's license from another state. Two-thirds of them were in the college towns that provided Hillary Clinton and Maggie Hassan with their margins of victory.

Only 1,014 of these newly-declared New Hampshire residents have since obtained a New Hampshire driver's license. Maybe a handful have stopped driving, but thousands of these self-professed Granite State voters are acting as if they never really lived here.

Democrats reacted to this rock-solid evidence that people from outside our state are influencing our elections with outrage, at Speaker Shawn Jasper for pointing it out, and at Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who has been urging the Legislature to close this loophole for years.

Democrats scream that thousands of out-of-staters casting New Hampshire ballots is not proof of illegal voter fraud.

They are correct. This is legal voter fraud.

New Hampshire's honor system allowed thousands to get a ballot with nothing more than their word that they actually considered themselves New Hampshire residents. The data obtained by Jasper are strong evidence that many of them lied.....

Irma at one time was the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the open Atlantic, a Category 5 with a peak wind speed of 185 mph (300 kph), and its approach set off alarm in Florida.

For days, forecasters had warned that Irma was taking dead aim at the Miami area and the rest of the state’s Atlantic coast.

But then Irma made a more pronounced westward shift that put a bull’s-eye on the Tampa area — the result of what meteorologists said was an atmospheric tug-of-war between weather systems that nudged Irma and determined when it made its crucial right turn into Florida.

KID ROCK DECONSTRUCTS THE HEGELIAN/MARXIST DIALECTIC AND BIRTHS US A QUIRK

September 10, 2017The Dialectics of Kid Rock

....Kid Rock, rightly, refuses to feel guilty about any of this. Indeed, Kid Rock represents a remarkable reversal from the left's cultural narrative, in which there is no individual, personal guilt, but only collective guilt – Kid Rock rejects all collective guilt and indeed the authority that enforces this new, collective morality. "Po-Dunk" revels in poverty, opulence, obesity, fecundity, and the right of the individual to wield violent force to protect its way of life. Kid Rock resolves in himself the contradictions of race, class, and gender without apology or remorse, a Hegelian synthesis of false dichotomies arranged by the Frankfurt School to destabilize a society disinterested in a Marxist revolution.

In other words, Kid Rock takes all the false dialectics, absorbs them, metabolizes them, and...well, if you've seen his videos, you know the rest, and it involves a roll of Radiohead toilet paper. If Trump is the clenched fist of the American people, Kid Rock is the middle finger that comes after the punch is thrown, at the very moment when the New Left expects an apology from those who dared to even challenge it.

All of this isn't about one Senate seat from Michigan, and what that might mean in terms of political calculations. It's about a movement in society. At bottom, it is guilt that is the fuel that the New Left relies on for its weaponized dialectics. And it is guilt that Kid Rock vehemently rejects, even the guilt of a straight white man.

To borrow Kid Rock's lyrics, "You never seen a m----------- quite like him." But the political stage is about to, and a lot of people are coming with him. Millions of them.

Currently a Ph.D. student in religion and politics at The Catholic University in Washington, D.C., the author has published academic articles on National Socialism as a religious movement in the Harvard University journal Cult/ure and on video games and existentialism in the book Past the Sky's Rim (Gray Matter Books). He also publishes fiction under the pen name Gibson Monk.

September 10, 2017Report: British government believes North Korea got help from Iran in building nuclear weaponsBy Rick Moran

According to reports in the Sunday Express and the Telegraph, British officials are convinced that the Iranians assisted North Korea in developing its nuclear arsenal.

The British government also believes that Russia gave vital assistance to North Korea in their ICBM program.

Senior Whitehall sources have told The Sunday Telegraph it is not credible that North Korean scientists alone brought about the technological advances.

One Government minister reportedly said: “North Korean scientists are people of some ability, but clearly they’re not doing it entirely in a vacuum.

Another Foreign Office source reportedly added: “For them to have done this entirely on their own stretches the bounds of credulity.”

Whilst Iran is reportedly top of the list of countries suspected of assisting North Korea in some form, Russia is also suspected of doing so.

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson also hinted at his department’s concerns last week as he took questions from MPs about the North Korea crisis.

Mr Johnson said: “There is currently an investigation into exactly how the country has managed to make this leap in technological ability.

“We are looking at the possible role that may have been played, inadvertently or otherwise, by some current and former nuclear states.”

It comes amid rising fears of World War 3 after North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear weapon test last week – describing it as an advanced hydrogen bomb for a long-range missile.

In the 1990s, the CIA pointed the finger at Pakistan and the nuclear black market network developed by "The Father of the Pakistan Bomb" A.Q. Khan as assisting both North Korea and Iran in going nuclear. In 2004, Khan confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. He later retracted that confession, but the proof of his activities is overwhelming.

Khan's specialty was centrifuge technology, machines that are vital in enriching uranium to bomb grade levels. Iran now has advanced centrifuges that we were assured by the Obama administration were under constant surveillance and could not be used to enrich uranium beyond the 5% level (85% enrichment is the minimum necessary to construct a bomb).

But what the British government is concerned about is that centrifuge technology requires first world expertise. North Korea could not possibily have built machines that required such precise engineering so that they could spin hundreds of times a second. The comings and goings of Iranian scientists to and from North Korea has long been noted.

As for Russia, it is believed that the rocket engines used in North Korea's advanced ICBM's came from Ukraine. If any nation knew how to smuggle those rocket engines out of Ukraine, it would be Russia.

North Korea has received a lot of help in developing it's nuclear and missile programs. Those nations who assisted Kim Jong-un in this endeavor could have blood on their hands if the US finds it necessary to take these programs out.

My heart is breaking for Chicago, and for all Americans, as one of our greatest cities crumbles before our (and the world’s) eyes. I don’t see any way out of the vicious circle of political corruption, irrevocable pensions obligations overwhelming tax revenue, vanishing public services, and a decline in civil order leading toward a third world level of crime. As a result, the city consumes itself, strangling business and entrepreneurship, and killing off precious assets. Now, comes a story that captures it all in one heart-rending example. Sam Cholke of DNAChicago writes: BRONZEVILLE — Chicago’s top-rated bed and breakfast is selling its historic mansion home and leaving Bronzeville because it’s too hard to persuade people to stay in the neighborhood. Owner Mell Monroe is closing Welcome Inn Manor, 4563 S. Michigan Ave., Trip Advisor’s top-rated bed and breakfast in Chicago, and putting the historic mansion up for sale for...(Read Full Post)Already have an account with American Thinker? Login below.

After all the North Korean strikes and allied counterstrikes, South Korea and the United States will eventually prevail in toppling the Kim regime after a bloody, pyrrhic war.

Even a couple of weeks of fighting will leave behind sights more suited to Stalingrad than Seoul, a ruined city marked by small-arms fire, annihilating missiles, and unexploded ordnance. Sites such as the Blue House and the U.S. Embassy will be destroyed, neighborhoods will be razed, and thousands of military and paramilitary forces will blanket the South. Corpses will litter the streets, and many people will lose their entire families.

The Kim dynasty will be expunged, leaving North Koreans to face a far more difficult situation than the famine in the 1990s. China will face a humanitarian crisis on its border as North Koreans migrate north in search of food and water.

The United States, Japan, and other developed countries will be under significant pressure to adopt tens of thousands of refugees from both sides. The death toll due to the hostilities could total in the hundreds of thousands, but the humanitarian crisis on the peninsula will result in far more through disease and malnutrition and could take decades to heal.

HURRICANE Irma is lashing southwest Florida threatening tornadoes and a deadly storm surge on the state’s east coast.

Irma has lost some strength as it travels north along Florida’s west coast, and is now a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 177km/h. But forecasts warn it will remain a powerful storm as it flooded Miami streets and knocked out power to more than four million homes and businesses.

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US President Donald Trump has declared a major disaster in Florida, and ordered federal funds to help the state and NGO recovery work that will begin once the storm allows.

He called the storm “some big monster” as it battered the Florida coast.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.